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DESQview
DESQview (DV) is a text mode multitasking operating environment developed by Quarterdeck Office Systems which enjoyed modest popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Running on top of DOS, it allows users to run multiple programs concurrently in multiple windows. Desq Quarterdeck's predecessor to DESQview was a task switching product called Desq (shipped late April or May 1984) which allows users to switch between running programs. Quarterdeck revamped its package, bringing multitasking in, and adding TopView compatibility. DESQview was released in July 1985, four months before Microsoft released the first version of Windows. It was widely thought to be the first program to bring multitasking and windowing capabilities to DOS, but in fact there was a predecessor, IBM TopView, which shipped March 1985, from which DESQview inherited the pop-up menu. Under DESQview, well-behaved DOS programs can be run concurrently in resizable, overlapping windows (something the first vers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quarterdeck Office Systems
Quarterdeck Office Systems, later Quarterdeck Corporation (NASDAQ: QDEK), was an American computer software company. It was founded by Therese Myers and Gary Pope in 1981 and incorporated in 1982. Their offices were initially located at 150 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, California and later at 13160 Mindanao Way in Marina del Rey, California, as well as a sales and technical support unit located in Clearwater, Florida. In the 1990s, they had a European office in Dublin, Ireland. Their most famous products were the Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager, DESQview, CleanSweep, DESQview/X, Quarterdeck Mosaic, Manifest and Partition-It. On April 18, 1989, Quarterdeck was awarded a US software patent that allowed multiple windowed PC applications under MS-DOS. After sales and its stock plummeted in 1995, interim CEO King R. Lee hired Gaston Bastiaens as CEO. In order to diversify the company's product offerings, Bastiaens began an ultimately unsuccessful acquisition spree. In 1995, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
QEMM-386
Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM) is a memory manager produced by Quarterdeck Office Systems in the late 1980s through the late 1990s. It was the most popular third-party memory manager for the MS-DOS and other DOS operating systems. QEMM product ranges ;QRAM: A memory manager for Intel 80286 or higher CPUs. It supports Chips and Technologies chipsets. 2.02 added SHADOWRAM switch. QEXT correctly reallocates eXtended Memory Specification (XMS). It includes VIDRAM, Optimize, LOADHI from QEMM 6.02, Manifest 1.13. Earlier versions of QRAM also supported the older 8086 and 8088 CPUs. ;QEMM Game Edition: It is a version of QEMM that includes Quarterdeck GameRunner. Patches for regular QEMM do not work on QEMM Game Edition. ;QEMM MegaBundle: In the version shipped with Borland SideKick for Windows, it is a version with SideBar 1.00 (1994-08-22) and QEMM 7.5. ;DESQview 386: It includes DESQview and QEMM-386. Features/tools QEMM driver QEMM provides access to the Upper Mem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM TopView
TopView is the first object-oriented, multitasking, and windowing, personal computer operating environment for PC DOS developed by IBM, announced in August 1984 and shipped in March 1985. TopView provided a text-mode (although it also ran in graphics mode) operating environment that allowed users to run more than one application at the same time on a PC. IBM demonstrated an early version of the product to key customers before making it generally available, around the time they shipped their new PC AT computer. Hopeful beginnings When Microsoft announced Windows 1.0 in November 1983, International Business Machines (IBM), Microsoft's important partner in popularizing MS-DOS for the IBM PC, notably did not announce support for the forthcoming window environment. IBM determined that the microcomputer market needed a multitasking environment. When it released TopView in 1985, the press speculated that the software was the start of IBM's plan to increase its control over the IBM ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual 8086 Mode
In the 80386 microprocessor and later, virtual 8086 mode (also called virtual real mode, V86-mode, or VM86) allows the execution of real mode applications that are incapable of running directly in protected mode while the processor is running a protected mode operating system. It is a hardware virtualization technique that allowed multiple 8086 processors to be emulated by the 386 chip. It emerged from the painful experiences with the 80286 protected mode, which by itself was not suitable to run concurrent real-mode applications well. John Crawford developed the Virtual Mode bit at the register set, paving the way to this environment. VM86 mode uses a segmentation scheme identical to that of real mode (for compatibility reasons), which creates 20-bit linear addresses in the same manner as 20-bit physical addresses are created in real mode, but are subject to protected mode's memory paging mechanism. Overview The virtual 8086 mode is a mode for a protected-mode task. Cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bulletin Board System
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email. Many BBSes also offer online games in which users can compete with each other. BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance asynchronous modems drove the use of online services and BBSes t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating Environment
In computer software, an operating environment or integrated applications environment is the environment in which users run application software. The environment consists of a user interface provided by an applications manager and usually an application programming interface (API) to the applications manager. An operating environment is ''not'' a full operating system, but is a form of middleware that rests between the OS and the application. For example, the first version of Microsoft Windows, Windows 1.0, was not a full operating system, but a GUI laid over DOS albeit with an API of its own. Similarly, the IBM U2 system operates on both Unix/Linux and Windows NT. Usually the user interface is text-based or graphical, rather than a command-line interface (e.g., DOS or the Unix shell), which is often the interface of the underlying operating system. In the mid 1980s, text-based and graphical user interface operating environments surrounded DOS operating systems with a shell th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Expanded Memory
In DOS memory management, expanded memory is a system of bank switching that provided additional memory to DOS programs beyond the limit of conventional memory (640 KiB). ''Expanded memory'' is an umbrella term for several incompatible technology variants. The most widely used variant was the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS), which was developed jointly by Lotus Software, Intel, and Microsoft, so that this specification was sometimes referred to as "LIM EMS". LIM EMS had several versions. The first widely implemented version was EMS 3.2, which supported up to 8 MiB of expanded memory and uses parts of the address space normally dedicated to communication with peripherals (upper memory) to map portions of the expanded memory. EEMS, an expanded-memory management standard competing with LIM EMS 3.x, was developed by AST Research, Quadram and Ashton-Tate ("AQA"); it could map any area of the lower 1 MiB. EEMS ultimately was incorporated in LIM EMS 4.0, which supporte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets, the instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 ''Fortune'' 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years. Intel supplies microprocessors for computer system manufacturers such as Acer, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel (''int''egrated and ''el''ectronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law) and Robert Noyce ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lotus Software
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US$3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client–server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete. On December 6, 2018, IBM announced the sale of Lotus Software/Domino to HCL for $1.8 billion. History Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Original Intel Pentium (P5 Microarchitecture)
The Pentium (also referred to as P5, its microarchitecture, or i586) is a fifth generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessor that was introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993, as the very first CPU in the Pentium brand. It was instruction set compatible with the 80486 but was a new and very different microarchitecture design from previous iterations. The P5 Pentium was the first superscalar x86 microarchitecture and the world's first superscalar microprocessor to be in mass productionmeaning it generally executes at least 2 instructions per clock mainly because of a design-first dual integer pipeline design previously thought impossible to implement on a CISC microarchitecture. Additional features include a faster floating-point unit, wider data bus, separate code and data caches, and many other techniques and features to enhance performance and support security, encryption, and multiprocessing, for workstations and servers when compared to the next best previous industry standard proce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DOS Memory Management
In IBM PC compatible computing, DOS memory management refers to software and techniques employed to give applications access to more than 640 kibibytes (640*1024 bytes) (KiB) of "conventional memory". The 640 KiB limit was specific to the IBM PC and close compatibles; other machines running MS-DOS had different limits, for example the Apricot PC could have up to 768 KiB and the Sirius Victor 9000, 896 KiB. Memory management on the IBM family was made complex by the need to maintain backward compatibility to the original PC design and real-mode DOS, while allowing computer users to take advantage of large amounts of low-cost memory and new generations of processors. Since DOS has given way to Microsoft Windows and other 32-bit operating systems not restricted by the original arbitrary 640 KiB limit of the IBM PC, managing the memory of a personal computer no longer requires the user to manually manipulate internal settings and parameters of the system. The 640 KiB limit imposed g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Upper Memory Area
In DOS memory management, the upper memory area (UMA) refers to memory between the addresses of 640 KB and 1024 KB ( 0xA0000–0xFFFFF) in an IBM PC or compatible. IBM reserved the uppermost 384 KB of the 8088 CPU's 1024 KB address space for BIOS ROM, Video BIOS, Option ROMs, video RAM, RAM on peripherals, memory-mapped I/O, and obsoleted ROM BASIC. However, even with video RAM, the ROM BIOS, the Video BIOS, the Option ROMs, and I/O ports for peripherals, much of this 384 KB of address space was unused. As the 640 KB memory restriction became ever more of an obstacle, techniques were found to fill the empty areas with RAM. These areas were referred to as upper memory blocks (UMBs). Usage The next stage in the evolution of DOS was for the operating system to use upper memory blocks (UMBs) and the high memory area (HMA). This occurred with the release of DR DOS 5.0 in 1990. DR DOS' built-in memory manager, EMM386.EXE, could perform most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
